Bretten Hannam

Bretten Hannam is a Canadian screenwriter and film director.[1] They are most noted for their 2015 feature film debut North Mountain, which premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2015 before going into limited commercial release in 2018.[2]

A Two-Spirit, non binary Mi'kmaq person, Hannam was born and raised in Nova Scotia.[1] Educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Dalhousie University, they made a number of short films prior to North Mountain; the most noted of these, Deep End, premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in 2011[3] and was included in the short film compilation Boys on Film 9: Youth in Trouble.[4]

In 2018, they participated in Now and Then, an exhibition of works by LGBTQ artists in conjunction with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.[5] Their contribution was the short film Elmiteskuatl, an interrogation of the complex relationship between First Nations peoples and colonialist conceptions of archives and museums.[5]

Their most recent short film, Wildfire, was produced with the assistance of the Whistler Film Festival's Aboriginal Filmmaker Fellowship,[6] and premiered at BFI Flare in 2019. A feature film expansion of Wildfire, tentatively titled Wildhood, was funded by Telefilm Canada in June 2019.[7]

In 2020, Hannam received a grant from the Inside Out Film and Video Festival's Re:Focus Emergency Relief Fund for the completion of a short documentary film titled Walqwin, about two-spirit culture in the Wabanaki Confederacy.[8]